Greece to the Dalmatian Coast

May – June 2017

We boarded the historic, four-masted sailing ship, Sea Cloud, in Athens, for our Lindblad-National Geographic adventure.  We were 50 passengers and an international crew of 60 on the ship built in 1931 for EF Hutton and Majorie Merriweather Post.

We sailed around the Peloponnesian Peninsula to the Ionian Sea into the Adriatic Sea and up the Dalmatian coast with stops in Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia.  In 1972 when Jim was stationed in Germany, we drove from our home in Mannheim to the former Yugoslavia.  On that trip we visited Dubrovnik, Split and Mostar and on this trip we returned to those cities and compared the changes 45 years had brought.  In this album, we’ve included images side-by-side but four and a half decades apart.  

The Balkans have had a difficult history with various factions occupying them at times for hundreds of years.  The wars of the early 1990’s pitting Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Muslims and Christians against each other and the resulting ethnic cleansing were a tragic continuation of that sad history.  

In both 1972 and in 2017, we visited Mostar and the famous Old Bridge (“Stari Most”).  It was originally built in about 1556 by the Ottomans, destroyed in 1993, and then rebuilt int 2004 with stone from the original quarry.  We hope it remains unmolested for the next 500 years.

We travel to learn – history, geography, culture.  This was a magnificent trip on a classic, historic ship!  We can hardly wait to sail on Sea Cloud again!